


A Belief

by Kannika



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Post-Endgame, Spitfire Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-21
Updated: 2016-04-21
Packaged: 2018-06-03 13:10:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6611824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kannika/pseuds/Kannika
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Artemis returns to Paris. Alone. </p>
<p>(Maybe.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Belief

**Author's Note:**

> Spitfire Week Day Four: return to Paris! I have never stuck with one of these this long, now I'm determined to get all the way through. 
> 
> I have returned to my natural habitat, drowning in angst. I hate this show.

The city was cold, and empty.

Artemis sucked in a breath, felt the early-morning mist curl inside of her lungs, and held it until she had to breathe. It… wasn’t what she had expected. She had expected it to feel more foreign. Different sights should have meant different tastes, but the air here tasted the same as it did at home.

She had been kind of hoping for different enough to knock her off her feet, because everything familiar had suddenly become a waking nightmare.

She opened her eyes, hoping the sight would be different enough to jar her mind: the Eiffel Tower, in the far distance but unmistakable. When she was a kid, she was obsessed with it for a while. In the way that little kids played dress-up and pretended they were princesses, she had looked at the Eiffel Tower and imagined she wasn’t at home.

And immediately that memory was crowded out by another, clearer memory, the one she had seen so many times that even drudging it up now didn’t unhinge her: their last mission. She remembered the Reach soldiers in front of her, and how easily they had fallen under her arrows: the pieces crumbling away like dust, the war so close to being won she could taste it. She remembered being underneath the legs of the Eiffel Tower, the sky dark and ominous and trying to swallow her whole, and wishing she could just stand and look up at it watching over the city like a guardian. She remembered being swept up in Wally’s arms (he never let her hit the ground), and the speed was so familiar, and they bantered about nothing and completed the mission and-

And the last time he had kissed her. And the world was ending around them, but there had been nothing different about it, nothing unusually desperate, because he had always kissed her like the world was ending and she was all that could save him.

Since the Eiffel Tower was the only fixed point she could see, Artemis started walking toward it. The street rang hollow under her feet. Everything was so damn loud, in this silence. She was probably the only one awake. The sun hadn’t even risen.

That was fine. She wanted solitude, no matter how bitter it tasted. She had so much of it and not enough. 

People had asked her if she wanted company, when she decided to come here- everyone who wasn’t scared of her, that was. The freshmen (although maybe she couldn’t call them that, after they’d gone through a war) didn’t speak to her, anymore. She knew she hadn’t exactly been the friendliest even… before, but she had never snapped too hard or reprimanded too harshly because she didn’t want them to realize how different she was from the others. The stain of growing up in fear and desperation was all over her skin, she sometimes felt, and she had done a good job hiding it before but now it was like she was tattooed with it. ‘Volatile, doesn’t deal with grief well if the track record shows, is liable to go off the deep end. Proceed with caution.’

Nobody had really said anything meaningful to her in a long time. They inched around her like she was a bomb about to go off. Even energetic Bart (she couldn’t call him by his other name, not yet, maybe ever) held a part of himself back. He had never gone on a mission with her, like he was as afraid as she was of calling him the wrong name.

But the others were past being scared, and they had offered. Kaldur as a gentle direct offer, understanding completely when she said no because he was doing a lot by himself, too. M’gann with tears in her eyes (Artemis had long since stopped feeling ashamed of herself for crying and joined her), asking over and over and over again if she was sure, not because she doubted her but because she wanted to help so badly. Conner only once, an awkward aside because he had never been good at showing pain, and when she turned him down he just said “let me know if you change your mind” but he seemed relieved, too.

She walked down the empty street, glad she had decided to come alone, because someone else would fill the air with chatter or reassurances or pressure her to talk, and she relished the silence. She hadn’t had enough of it, for months, and she had never filled the silence in her mind the way other people did. Silence was natural. Silence was peace. Silence was the direction the world tended and nothing to fear.

(Good thing she felt that way, because there was too much of it at home.)

Maybe it was a mistake to come here, though, because she took a step further and the smell of baking bread hit her nose (that was new, they didn’t have a bakery at home that made things fresh) and her first thought was _Wally._ And it made her pause, in the middle of the street, and fight down the wave of pain, turn it into something manageable. Yes, Wally would have loved the smell of freshly-made food, but that didn’t mean she needed to dissolve right here, right now, after only being here for half an hour.

But she missed him, so much, like a constant dagger in her heart, and right now it twisted so hard she felt like screaming. In the silence that was all around her she wasn’t creating his voice, that didn’t seem wise, but she was aware of its absence. If he was here, he would be talking a mile a minute about everything around them, no respect for the quiet hour. He would be pulling her into the bakery to see the baker working, inhaling deeply and talking about how delicious it would be, maybe seeing if he could use his enthusiasm to get them something before it even opened. He would be holding her hand, clasping her shoulder, sweeping fingers through her hair, twirling her by the waist, kissing her cheeks and her forehead and her lips and the back of her neck, and when she turned to look at him-

_Don’t._

Artemis strode faster down the street, away from the smell and the memory, and was fiercely glad her sister and mom weren’t there. They meant well, she knew they did, but they were a different kind of unbearable. Her sister turned grief into anger- it was what she had done when she thought Artemis was dead, and it seemed to work- but Artemis wasn’t there yet, maybe for the first time ever, and it exhausted her. Every other time life had been unfair, she had gotten angry, she had thrown herself into her work, she had beaten things until she bled or they did, but this felt… bigger. Wally wasn’t in jail and coming back god-knew-when. Wally wasn’t missing but out there for her to find. Wally was… was…

Gone. That was all she could make herself think yet, even a month later. ‘Gone’. Gone and not coming back, not ever, no matter what she would give to have him back, no matter how much he hadn’t deserved it of all people. And she’d see him again… when she saw him. That was it.

And that was the other thing that she kept pushing from her mind. Her mom, when she cornered Artemis and held her hand, would only say softly that “Wally is with you, Artemis. He always will be.” And Artemis knew that her mom had never been religious, or spiritual, or a believer in anything but the things she could see and feel in a physical way, and so she had always been the same. There was no place for someone watching over you when, in her experience, they hadn’t. There was no ‘higher power’ to ask for help from because if there was someone pulling the strings, they had a wicked sense of humor. Why else would her mom be crippled and broke but a good person and her dad be the worst person ever but always walk free?

So there was no higher power holding Wally, waiting for her to come see him. Or there was, and to get there she had to believe, and she had never been that good at lying to herself.

(She didn’t know which was worse.)

Right now, though, Artemis paused, just for the hell of it.

Closed her eyes and focused so intensely on the silence and stillness that she felt her heartbeat under her skin and heard the blood rushing in her ears.

Let her awareness expand the same way she had felt M’gann do in meditation. Everything in, nothing out. Everything open. Everything calm. A part of everything around her, and therefore emotionless, at peace. The city didn’t remember. The city didn’t mourn. The city couldn’t get blindsided by false hope or comfort or crumble under the weight of too much love and want.

Thought, _Wally._

And if there was a flicker of something in the back of her mind, by the time she snapped her eyes open and jolted back into awareness of herself and her grief and the silent city it was gone.

She swallowed, hard, and kept walking toward the Eiffel Tower.


End file.
